The New Year is right around the corner and less than 12 hours away from its rendezvous with 2012. It’s time to start prepping for our canary reading resolutions for 2013, fluttering our wings happily over all the wonderful, upcoming book releases, and (of course) time to take a fond, farewell look at 2012. In this post, we’re gonna do a sweep through – and a sweep up! – of all our top read, most loved and curiously odd posts and thoughts of this last year. Here are our…

…Top Read Posts of 2012:

• The UFA: Urban Fantasy of America – Finding an Urban Fantasy novel for each US state!
• The Best and Worst of Urban Fantasy Boys – guest writer Rhiannon J. Taylor talks about her favorite and not-so-favorite narrators in the genre.
• Storytelling Podcast Shortlist – Meg scours the interwebs for some story-telling podcasts to end all story-telling podcasts.
• You Only Get Three Seconds to Make a First Impression – Part of the pitch slapped series, the canaries take a look at how to pack the most punch in the smallest possible word count package.
• Cold Days by Jim Butcher – We love the Dresden Files, and so do you! This November book review takes fifth place in our top posts for 2012.

Our Canary Favorites of 2012:

With over 150 books read this year and 125 articles posted, this is gonna be a hard one. But we’ll try anyway! Here are some of our personal favorite posts written in 2012…

• A New Year – and Dragons! – It’s only fitting to finish up the Year of the Dragon with a salute to our favorite dragons. A gold-hoarding dragon, a dragon in a cupboard, and an evil, button-eye dragon mother…who’s your favorite dragon in fantasy?
• Death, With Feeling (a review of Michael Scott’s The Magician)  – A review that immortalized a terribly undescriptive description, and throws a glowstick into the depths of the book doompit that is the overabundance of ‘ly’ words.
• Books and Instant Insomnia – The canaries chart the diverse literary fauna, including the dangerous genus of books guaranteed to knock you out cold with one swipe of their battered, coffee-splattered covers. Readers beware.
• Sneak peek at the Rise of Nine by Pittacus Lore – We just can’t stay away from some books. Here is (well, was) a sneak peek at the next book in our favorite-love-to-hate series. Also the reason why no one trusts theothercanary.
• Harry Dresden Around the World – Ever wonder what  a fifteen-year-old anime Harry Dresden battling flying werewolves looks like? Here are some international covers – Japan, France, Russia, and more. What else was I gonna do waiting for the November release of Cold Days?

Books Read in 2012:

My reading goal for 2012 was to read 150 books. I failed with a flat 134 – but there were plenty of jewels in the bunch. Here are some of the reading highlights of this year:

Everything Ever by Jim Butcher – Despite a rocky start and mostly due to strong and somewhat threatening encouragement from theothercanary, I powered through the lackluster first couple novels of the Dresden Files…and fell in love.

Worldsoul by Liz Williams – Picked up on a lark, this book skyrocketed up my list. It combines lovely character-building with an even more awesome world-building concept and execution this side of Terry Pratchett. I have already picked up Snake Agent by this author and I’m looking forward to starting it in the new year.

City of Promise by Dawn Prough – Out of all the self- and independently published books I read this year, Prough’s novel stands up for having the most clever and creative premise – and one based on a real life engineering proposal that never happened. Vampires in a city floating in the middle of an ocean. Nuff said.

Demon Bound by Caitlin Kittredge – I’d grown tired of the same-old, too-quirky paranormal/urban fantasy narrative voices when this book came along and reignited my love for the genre. Gritty, snarky, and desperate. I love it.

And so many more!

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What are some of your memorable 2012 reads?